“He say, effendi, that a guard of ein men, Yusuf, his name—­I know him—­he is in the Secret Service—­ oh, we will have no trouble with him—­” Here Joe chafed his thumb and forefinger with the movement of a paying teller counting a roll.  “He come every morning to Galata Bridge for you me.  He say, too, if any trouble while you paint I go him—­ ah, effendi, it is only Joe Hornstog can do these things.  The Pasha, he know me—­all good Turk-men know me.  Where we paint now, subito?  In the plaza, or in the patio of the Valedee, like last year?”

“Neither.  We go first to the Mosque of Suleiman.  I want the view through the gate of the court-yard, with the mosque in the background.  Best place is below the cafe.  Pick up those traps and come along.”

Thus it was that on this particular summer afternoon Joe and I found ourselves on the shadow side of a wall up a crooked, break-neck street paved with rocks, each as big as a dress-suit case, from which I got a full view of the wonderful mosque tossing its splendors into the still air, its cresting of minarets so much frozen spray against the blue.

The little comedy—­or shall I say tragedy?—­began a few minutes after I had opened my easel—­I sitting crouched in the shadow, my elbow touching the plastered wall.  Only Joe and I were present.  Yusuf, the guard, a skinny, half-fed Turk in fez and European dress, had as usual betaken himself to the cafe fronting the same sidewalk on which I sat, but half a block away; far enough to be out of hearing, but near enough to miss my presence should I decamp suddenly without notifying him.  There he drank some fifty cups of coffee, each one the size of a thimble, and smoked as many cigarettes, their burned stubs locating his seat under the cafe awning as clearly as peanut-shells mark a boy’s at the circus.  I, of course, paid for both.

So absorbed was I in my work—­the mosque never was so beautiful as on that day—­I gave no thought to the fact that in my eagerness to hide my canvas from the prying sun I had really backed myself into a small wooden gate, its lintel level with the sidewalk —­a dry, dusty, sun-blistered gate, without lock or hasp on the outside, and evidently long closed.  Even then I would not have noticed it, had not my ears caught the sound of a voice—­two voices, in fact—­low, gurgling voices—­as if a fountain had just been turned on, spattering the leaves about it.  Then my eye lighted, not only on the gate, but upon a seam or split in the wood, half-way up its height, showing where a panel was sometimes pushed back, perhaps for surer identification, before the inside wooden beam would be loosened.

So potent was the spell of the mosque’s witchery that the next instant I should have forgotten both door and panel had not Joe touched the toe of my boot with his own—­he was sitting close to me—­and in explanation lifted his eyebrow a hair’s breadth, his eyes fixed on the slowly sliding panel—­sliding noiselessly, an inch at a time.  Only then did my mind act.